Moving Stories: (E)motion and Narrative in Anna Karenina 1

This article guides its reader through the connections between motion and emotion in Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina, an intricately linked narrative of desire in the age of railroad travel. It finds the coupling of motion and emotion implicated in plot scenarios, in the novel's verbal texture, and in the movement of narrative articulated by metaphor and the patterning of motifs. The near synonymy of motion and emotion gives an intimation of the dual forces harboured in Tolstoi's novel: the desirous sexuality which drives the plot and the pleasurable sensuality of reading.